Are Development Dollars in Pakistan Being Well Spent?: Time

By Ken Stier

To development experts who have long called for a shift in strategy in the Muslim world, it would seem like cause for celebration. After years of devoting the bulk of U.S. aid to Pakistan to military assistance, Washington is about to shift that equation. Under legislation approved by the Senate last week and by the House on Wednesday, Pakistan can expect to receive $1.5 billion of non-military (or civilian) aid for each of the next five years, which triples previous levels and will roughly balance out the amount of military aid the U.S. gives to Pakistan.

But getting the money is only half the battle; how well it works — and whether it helps to change strong anti-American sentiment — depends on getting it to the right people and projects on the ground. That job principally falls to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and many critics say its performance isn't very encouraging. "When you are spending large amounts of money at arm's length, operating in hostile environments, it is very easy for money to get spent corruptly and/or badly, and that is what I have seen in our health programs," says Roger Bates of the American Enterprise Institute, a trenchant USAID critic.

One early effort in education already appears to be a cautionary tale. Improving schooling in the country has been a key focus of U.S. development efforts, both to undermine the need for and appeal of religious schools (or madrasahs) and to advance literacy, which is 43% among adults; two-thirds of Pakistani women cannot read or write. In long, jargon-filled reports, the principal USAID contractor on an $83 million, five-year education-sector reform project, North Carolina–headquartered RTI (also known as Research Triangle Institute), claims to have "positively impacted" more than 400,000 students (out of 70 million school-age kids) through strengthening policy and planning, teacher and school-administrator training, and youth and adult literacy. But when USAID's inspector general sent a team over in August 2007 to check on the progress, it could not validate the claims because the USAID mission in Islamabad "did not require RTI to adhere to reporting requirements critical to monitoring the program performance." The problem was serious enough for RTI, which derived close to 40% of its $710 million in revenues last year from USAID, to be disqualified from follow-on contracts on this particular project.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: Are Development Dollars in Pakistan Being Well Spent?: Time